Henry Aubin: Maybe downsizing won’t save money

Henry Aubin, The Gazette01.20.2013

Henry Aubin

Can debt-ridden Quebec, needing to economize, reduce its full slate of services — in other words, shrink l’état providence — without setting itself up for exploitation by either organized crime or more “respectable” corporate exploiters? Can Montreal’s city hall avoid a similar fate?John Mahoney
/ The Gazette

MONTREAL — A Paris-based historian who specializes in the Mafia in different countries and who has followed Quebec’s scandals from afar suggests that what’s occurring here is not mere happenstance.

Rather, it’s part of an international pattern: When the public sector downsizes and resorts increasingly to outsourcing, he says, organized crime seizes the opportunity to step in and prosper.

This rule of thumb by Jacques de Saint Victor, reported in last weekend’s Le Devoir, implicitly raises troubling questions: Can debt-ridden Quebec, needing to economize, reduce its full slate of services — in other words, shrink l’état providence — without setting itself up for exploitation by either organized crime or more “respectable” corporate exploiters? Can Montreal’s city hall avoid a similar fate?

The historian’s observation has a strong ring of truth. Quebecers have seen plenty of bits and pieces of corroborative evidence. The Duchesneau report, for example, concluded in 2011 that the provincial transport ministry’s cuts in its own staff of technicians and engineers created an opportunity for private firms to assume the oversight of projects and, often through collusion, to jack up costs.

Similarly, the Tremblay administration’s cuts of expert civil servants and increased reliance on consultants with conflicts of interest led to the ill-fated waterworks contract. Privatization of services such as snow removal also smell of violence-enforced collusion.

The Parisian’s perspective puts all such items in a unifying context.

To be sure, the increasing reliance on contracting out by the province and Montreal does not fully explain the growing strength in recent years of collusion and corruption. Other factors would include the arrival of generous federal infrastructure funding of construction projects (which provide opportunities for exploitation), the imposition of municipal mergers (which created bigger units of local government with inadequate oversight) and various social factors.

The historian mentions one such social underpinning: The rise of individualism and the decline in a sense of community. “The Mafia surfs on the idea of ultra-individualism” and on “the legitimacy of predatory profit” — of which Enron’s criminality and Wall Street banks’ anti-social profiteering are symbols.

But back to that tough question: How does one shrink the size of government to save money without inadvertently ushering in rot?

One part of the answer is to re-examine the premise: In some cases, as the Duchesneau report suggests, downsizing might in fact not save money. Public-sector employees might, by averting cost overruns, be cheaper — such as in the case of public inspectors of road infrastructure.

Another part of the answer is to avoid authorities’ standard response to problems: “Hey, let’s create another agency or unit to serve as watchdog.” Too, often the watchdogs are grossly ineffectual.

Example: The province set up the Commission municipale du Québec in 1932 to, among other things, investigate cities’ and towns’ financial irregularities. Radio-Canada noted in 2010 that the unit had not probed a single case in the previous 20 years.

Example: The province set up the lobbying commission in 2002 to track corporate influence in the halls of power. Yet, strangely, the law fails to require the masters of the art, the big engineering-consulting companies’ emissaries, to declare as lobbyists.

Example: Quebec set up its elections office in the 1970s to ensure clean votes. Illegal financing at the municipal level has boomed. The office claims it lacks power to probe many abuses.

Example: The McGill University Health Centre’s board of directors is supposed to oversee the financial rigour of the superhospital. It has snored.

We probably have enough watchdog units today. The trick is to make the existing ones work.

Make the people on them more accountable. Give them, when necessary, more legal muscle. Make sure elected officials who oversee appointments to these bodies do not owe their own elections to unscrupulous private interests.

On that last point, the Marois government deserves credit for reducing the maximum donation to a provincial political party from $1,000 to $100, thus shrinking the influence that money can buy. But, despite this year being an election year for all cities and towns, it has yet to do anything similar at the sleazy municipal level. Irresponsible.

Oh, and here’s a sobering final note.

Organized crime can slither into not only the rough and ready world of road construction and municipal services. The health sector, says Jacques de Saint Victor, is also vulnerable.

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